There are many aspects to maintaining a successful blog: there’s the quality of the content, the quantity of content, search engine optimization practices and general day-to-day maintenance to worry about, making it one heck of a job, even for the casual blogger. Fortunately, bloggers using WordPress can take advantage of many plugins available for free that will optimize their blog’s potential and make it far more functional than the basic package that WordPress provides by default. We have outlined our five favorite picks when it comes to plugins that will improve your blog’s content, and we think you will like them, too.

All-in-One SEO Pack

Consistently ranked as one of the most popular WordPress plugins, All-in-One SEO Pack does for a blogger what a printer did for the news industry. In a nutshell, this plugin automatically optimizes any WordPress blog for all the major search engines. You will be able to add meta data, descriptions, tags and other relevant pieces of information about your blog, which will then be propagated by the plugin. You can also easily input specific keywords and titles that you want used for your website, making keyword optimization easier than ever.

SEO Smart Links

In addition to providing automatic SEO advantages for your blog, SEO Smart Links also gives the blogger access to customized lists of keywords. This plugin automatically searches your site for relevant information that pertains to specific words in posts and links them together, making it easier for your users to navigate your website very much like an encyclopedia. It is a great solution for linking your pages together and also for adding affiliate links to certain parts of your site.

Scribe SEO

We all tend to do better when we are being scored or timed; Scribe SEO is a WordPress plugin that combines the best of monitoring to tell you how well you are doing in optimizing your content. Besides being a creation of Copyblogger, this plugin is effective by analyzing the aspects of each post and how it relates to text layout, keywords and other factors. From here, the plugin assigns each page an overall score that explains how well this page is perceived by search engines.

Google XML Sitemaps

Having a sitemap for your blog is crucial when it comes to search engine spiders being able to locate all the pages in your blog. There is plenty of functionality when it comes to the placement of the sitemap; you can situate it virtually anywhere your layout will accommodate. This is a great plugin to have if you want to make sure that your site is being properly indexed and that all new posts, blogs and pages are being accurately and quickly displayed by search engines.

Pingler.com WordPress Plugin

We may be a little biased, but the reality is that Pingler’s WordPress Plugin can come in quite handy for a number of blogging tasks. Having a news feed that is relevant to your site or blog’s interests can give your visitors something extra and can make your blog seem more like a fully-interactive website. There is a free and premium version to choose from, with the free version offering an update of five pings/posts every 24 hours.